Kevin: Good afternoon everyone. So Craig, you’ve been in the fitness industry for over 26 years and with that, I imagine comes a bit of wisdom. Why don’t you start with your story and how you got to where you are now?
Craig: Sure Kevin. Well, first of all, I started in the fitness industry as a personal trainer making $3.50 an hour.
Kevin: wow.
Craig: So I’ve been at it for a while and I grew up in the fitness industry at an executive level. I was president of two of the largest fitness organizations in the United States. I was executive vice president of sales and marketing for the world’s largest gym chain operating in 11 countries. I also owned and successfully operated my own fitness company. I visited 30 countries and assessed health and fitness trends across Russia, Asia, and Europe. I’ve been to dozens of fitness conventions, purchased millions of dollars’ worth of health and fitness equipment, supplements and other related products, and also had the ability to train thousands of health and fitness professionals on everyone and help them help. other people improve their lives. So this really got me to where I am today, which is where I got to the point where I want to do something more and that’s why I wrote my book The Big Fat Healthy Fitness Lie and founded the Fit Advocate website so that I could create a platform to protect and improve the lives and health and fitness of consumers.
Kevin: You just mentioned your book, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie, which I love. What is the big fitness lie? Let’s put it on the table.
Craig: Why fine words? Let’s go deeper. The lie is that there are billion dollar industries getting rich while we get sick and fat and with all the supposed solutions available to lose weight and improve our health, we are literally in the worst shape in the history of modern civilization. . There are huge gains in sickness and fatness, and a lot of times people question that and think, “Oh, well, we live in the United States, we’re in great health, and we have the best health care system,” which is a complete fallacy. Here’s an interesting fact that people should keep in mind: We’re approaching about 300 million people in the US, and we have 200 million illnesses each year being diagnosed for conditions that could be prevented with simple changes in style. of life.
Kevin: wow.
Craig: And we spend in the United States, 270 billion dollars writing 3.7 billion prescriptions, not to cure anything because there really are very few cures in modern medicine, medicine is mainly meant to mask our symptoms. So if we put a lot of toxic chemicals into our bodies, we know there’s a lot of confusion and misinformation out there about health and fitness. Unfortunately, there is a huge opportunity for people to make a lot of money with their lack of knowledge on how to lose weight, improve their health, get fit and live better. So millions of people are paying thousands of dollars that have no chance of helping them achieve their goal and that’s really the big lie.
Kevin: And let me ask you this, you’ve been on the other side, you’ve been part of the industry that’s making a lot of money out of gyms and organizations and everything. When did you suddenly say, “Hey, maybe I need to educate people on this.”
Craig: Well, first of all, I never felt that the club industry was a bad industry.
Kevin: It’s okay.
Craig: And in my book I’m still a big proponent of joining a gym for the average person, there are of course some caveats about getting a quality club. I have an article on the ten worst hacks for the fitness industry. So I try to expose the things that I think are bad, but there’s a lot of good, too, but the thing that I noticed while operating all these clubs and trying to help people is that I would talk to thousands of consumers, face to face. For much of my career, my job was to go out and help, to work with people on the field, club operators, managers, salespeople, fitness staff members, personal trainers, to talk to them about how to help people make decisions that are good for them and the guiding principle of course was always not to focus on making money, focus on helping people and you will make money as a natural by-product of helping people. That has always been one of my guiding principles, but when you talk to all of these consumers, you find that the average person spends thousands and thousands of dollars on products and services that have no chance of helping them. They spend hours and hours wasted on information that will never help them improve their health or change their lives. So I got fed up, frustrated and really disgusted with all the quick fixes out there that people jump from one to another without really understanding the real cause of why they are in such poor health. So I wanted to try to educate them on all the things, the lies, the deceptions and at the same time try to give them simple solutions on how to improve their health, how to lose weight, how to get fit, how to live better, how to feel better without gimmicks or tricks for the rest of their lives. That’s what the big health and fitness lie is really about and that’s what the Fit Advocate website is really about.
Kevin: And he takes a different approach in his book compared to many of the other books I’ve read about health and fitness and it’s related to addiction. You say addiction feeds all this lie. What do you mean by that?
Craig: Well, many people live a self-inflicted toxic lifestyle that destroys their health and fuels this lie. So what do I mean by that? Well, the definition of toxic, first of all, is poison and in our society we are surrounded by poisons, in our air, it’s in our water, some of them we can’t avoid and many of them we can, however. Many of these poisons are not going to kill us today, but rather slowly and quietly deteriorate and destroy our health.
There are two specific types of poisons or toxins that I’m talking about that create these health problems. The first, of course, is chemical exposures. There are thousands of untested chemical combinations in our food supply to improve flavor, texture, color, or extend shelf life. There are low-calorie, low-carb foods laced with toxic sweeteners that have contributed to obesity and diabetes. We have been conditioned to believe that sodium fluoride, for example, is good for our teeth. However, it is a known chemical waste byproduct of the aluminum and phosphate fertilizer industry. This chemical has been pumped into our water supply and put into our dental hygiene products for years, but many developed countries have outright rejected fluoridation due to the dangers and the lack of real scientific evidence of any health benefit. . Beyond that, we have toxic chemicals in our household products, our cleaning products, personal hygiene products. Fruits and vegetables have been treated with herbicides and pesticides. Chickens and cows are fed ground chicken and beef. They are then filled with antibiotics to prevent disease due to the horrible conditions in which they live and where they are slaughtered. So we have all these, you know, all this chemical toxicity. That is the first concern.
The second is the largest toxic exposure that is related to stress, and people don’t realize this, but up to 80% of all illnesses are the result of stress and having the ability to travel all over the world. world and visit, you know. , I think I’ve been to over 40 countries now, you find that we in the United States are the most stressed country on the planet. We work more than any other activity that is not sleeping. Just think of our normal lives, we wake up every day and run out of power from morning to night. We have the pressures at work, at home, the challenges of maintaining some kind of happy relationship with our loved ones. We have the demands of the children, trying to pay the bills. We have all the negativity on the news. We’re all trying to live the American dream that is based on financial freedom, but the truth is that only a fraction of people really realize the American dream and the rest of us are just trying to get by and, you know. , we are buried in a mountain of debt. All of these things add up to a great deal of worry and stress and to deal with this stress, what do we do? We drink, smoke, take drugs, overeat, eat the wrong food, and spend hours in front of the television or surfing the Internet. Unfortunately all of these activities make us fat, lazy and out of shape and what happens is this ill health that is created from this self addictive lifestyle creates and opens the door for these big lies about health and the physical state. One of them is the companies that market, manufacture and market and sell products that have no chance of helping us and then, of course, the worst is when we look to synthetic chemical compounds, prescription drugs, as the first line of defense to manage our problems of self-inflicted health So we really have a lot of issues that we have to deal with to be healthy, but people need to understand the basis of where it starts, the cause.
Kevin: Yes. How does someone take that kind of addiction or, unquote, addictive personality and turn it into a physical success?
Craig: Well, the first thing they have to do is identify it.
Kevin: Yes.
Craig: You have to realize. Here it is, here’s a very important fact that people should know, the number one reason people give for not exercising regularly is that they don’t have enough time, okay? Yet the average American watches four and a half hours of television a day. So there’s a problem with priority and people have to understand that time is the most important thing and the most valuable thing we have because once it’s gone it can’t be got back. If you want to improve your health, you have to make time to do all the things that are necessary to improve and improve your health and life, and it’s not just exercise, it’s one of the key components. So first they need to understand the issues and then have the right motivation and set the right priorities to get them where they need to be.
